WHEN JEREMY FLEW TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN

WHEN JEREMY FLEW TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN

Jeremy was born into a fabulously wealthy family. His father, Kenneth, had leveraged his newspaper publishing inheritance into the dominant publishing and television empire in the country. He was a brute.

Brutality ran in the family. Jeremy’s grandfather had also been a brute to his son and that was how Kenneth understood bringing up a son should be done. Jeremy’s life eventually became a bizarre spectacle of a son battling to win his father’s love and respect. It was an ordeal on show for all the world to marvel at.

Jeremy was destined to ultimately inherit his father’s multi-billion dollar fortune but Kenneth tenaciously kept his grip on his empire even as he lay close to death.

As a child Jeremy was derided by his father as too soft, too close to his mother or simply a loser. As he grew and matured he was impelled to make his father proud in the only way his family knew – by making money. But until the day Kenneth died Jeremy was regarded by his father as unworthy of taking the reins of the family empire. Deep down Jeremy hated his father but he was compelled to withhold his feelings from view.

Jeremy was not the country’s most handsome bachelor, but he was potentially one of the richest. He dated a succession of gorgeous women, mostly models whom he met through a large modelling agency owned by a friend of his father. If the agency had a girl he fancied it was a simple matter to score an introduction. And who was going to turn him down. He was going to inherit a multi-billion-dollar fortune.

His close friends were puzzled by him. One part of him was soft gentle and romantic, a man who treated women well and the other part was arrogant and cocky and surrounded by macho guys who bragged about their conquests and talked disparagingly about women.

Soon after his thirtieth birthday Jeremy proposed to his girlfriend, Judith, known among other things for her raunchy photo shoots. She was tall, wild, striking and fun. But her public exploits were an embarrassment to the family and the engagement was short lived when Judith tired of his wild life with his friends and other women. Jeremy paid her a substantial  multi-million dollar settlement to terminate the marriage agreement.

Almost as soon as the breakup became public, Jeremy found a replacement for Judith, a swimsuit model with obvious physical charms, Anita, with whom he had been seen dining out and basking together at the beach where she disported herself in a skimpy string bikini. His friends told the gossip mags that he was happy at last.

Kenneth’s health was failing. His arteries were blocked and his kidneys were failing. Jeremy was keen to tie the knot with Anita as soon as possible and a huge wedding ceremony was planned so that Kenneth could attend before his life came to an end. But a kidney transplant gave Kenneth another five years of life.

After less than three years of marriage to Jeremy Anita announced that she and Jeremy were going their separate ways. She said there had been precious little fun in their marriage for a long time. She was turning her back on a business empire and the family billions. Two weeks after the marriage break up Jeremy was photographed at Los Angeles airport with a British glamour model.

       Kenneth’s heart finally gave out after several years of intense medical treatment. His last public act was a huge funeral at the opera house choreographed by a famous movie actor and attended as befits a multi billionaire by one thousand of the most notable people in the country.

Jeremy told the gathering that in his opinion and the opinion of his family, his father was a legend. He said, “My most precious memories are of course not about the legend but about my dad. My memories will sustain me through my life. He was my mentor and my teacher but above all he was my father and that was my greatest fortune.” It was obvious that Jeremy was putting the best possible gloss on what had been a painful and difficult relationship.

Kenneth had been a pessimistic and neurotic investor who always thought the sky was about to fall in. He was always cashed up and able to buy good assets when other people had problems. That was how he expanded his fortune. But Jeremy didn’t follow that strategy.

When Jeremy was asked after his father died why he didn’t just put his billions in the bank and live off the interest he said; “If I sat back and decided to live off the product of my father’s work like a leech I wouldn’t be able to look at myself in the mirror.” There was no chance of Jeremy walking away but ironically, he would have been much better off if he had done just that rather than take the course he took. He was driven by a determination to match his father’s achievements and earn the respect he craved.

Like his father Jeremy became obsessed with proving his worth by making money. He understood that was expected of him. He did not appear to believe in anything else. He had no dreams of advancing technology like other moguls or of sharing his massive fortune and he did not crave power or influence. He never appeared to bring any emotion to running his business or pursuing his goals. He was only interested in numbers. They were his score because in his quest to be a billionaire his score would be his way of showing his success.

But financial storms soon struck Jeremy’s empire with a vengeance the likes of which nobody had foreshadowed. He had sold off his father’s media empire and changed the focus of the business to buying and owning casinos. He gambled the cash he got from selling the empire into buying casinos in Las Vegas and Macau.

But a sub-prime mortgage financial crisis turned the casino investments to dust. Billions of dollars had been squandered. The saving grace was that his Australian Casinos had not been affected by the financial crisis. But they too would eventually cause him grief and humiliation when they came under scrutiny and prosecution for mismanagement and dodgy cash laundering.

He had lost billions of dollars, but he hoped for now that with luck the worst could be behind him.

Jeremy’s second marriage had now failed leaving his wife and their two children living in a mansion in Los Angles while he travelled the world looking for business deals and enjoying a hectic social life.

Just four months after the formal split from his second wife Jeremy had been publicly involved in a romance with a famous super model but by now that romance was on the rocks.

He was holidaying at his luxury resort at the ski fields of Aspen when Jeremy met with a famous female pop singer. They met again a little time later at a movie premiere in Los Angeles. They stayed in touch and met again at a casino opening in the Philippines. And now he was mesmerised by the pop singer. He was smitten. They had fallen hard and fast. They were photographed spending time together on his yacht moored near the Italian isle of Capri. The relationship was big news. They were soon engaged.

She first started singing Italian operatic arias at the age of three. Of course, her voice was soft and sweet, and she didn’t understand the Italian words she was singing. She was mimicking her mother, a professional opera singer who practiced at home every day. But passers-by who heard her when she sang would stop momentarily in the street to listen as they walked past the house. Her little voice was already captivating her unseen audience.

 When she reached school age she started writing short songs of love and yearning which came purely from her imagination.

Life at home with her mother was not so peaceful. Opera singers worked at night and her mother was out until late every night, and not always because she was working. Things were tense at home. Her much older brother was running with a rough crowd and feeling the wrath of her engineer father. Her father was in constant conflict with her mother.

 By the time she was five years old the family had split into two and she spent all her weekends with her father who didn’t have any clues on how to help his little daughter grow and develop through childhood. Her brother would come and go erratically from her mother’s home. Singing became her mainstay. In her teens she moved to New York and got work singing as a back- up artist for a recording studio. She continued to write and record her own songs on a little cassette tape which she carried with her at all times. She was noticed by a recording company boss who took her on board and locked her into an onerous contract. She married him but they soon divorced.

She became a pop star.

By the time she took up with Jeremy she had been married twice and had twin boys .

But their engagement was short lived.

Her engagement to a multi-billionaire had ignominiously disintegrated and crashed.

She was letting the world know that she was furious.         

 Her perpetual smile had become transfixed into a vindictive grimace.

Her 35-carat diamond ten-million-dollar engagement ring was no longer on her finger. Word was that she had hocked it for two million dollars

She stood at the front entrance to her apartment and set fire to her very expensive wedding gown. She called it performance art.

Videographers were waiting on hand to record the event which immediately appeared on her internet blog.

She had wanted a pre-nuptial agreement but the agreement his lawyers had proposed ended up being an unromantic 37 page highly legalistic document. Her intended spouse was terrified that one day she could take everything from him.

Their marriage was to have been the third for each of them but the dissolution of their six-month long engagement had been explosive

When you give a woman a 37-page pre-nup that reads as a business agreement with a five-year term, it means that you have a five-year plan and you’re using her for your five-year plan says a friend. “It was a business arrangement rather than love.

Jeremy told the media that he began dating the songstress during a low point in his personal life when he was more than five billion dollars in debt. “She was kind, exciting and fun, he said. She is a woman of substance. She is very bright but it was a mistake for her and it was a mistake for me.”

Jeremy said he felt that he had flown too close to the sun.